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Respect The Architect | Architecture on Twitter

Today, I'm starting a new column called "Respect The Architect". When I'm on air you hear me say Tarik aka The Architect. People ask me what does that mean? Well it has a double meaning. The first meaning is that just like a bring materials together to create a building, I bring songs together to construct a set of music. The second meaning is from my previous life, I practiced Architecture. I work for a firms in Minneapolis that designed buildings like bars, restaurants, athletic facilities, and even airports. I received my Bachelor of Architecture from Howard University in Washington DC back 1996. Besides music, design and Architecture has always been a passion for me. I have been highlighting music on this blog, I thought I share with you my love for Architecture and design here as well. I want to highlight the importance of Architects and Architecture. I feel the profession doesn't get the respect as it should. Fashion designers get more respect than Architects, and I want to change that at least through these little posts.

The first post for "Respect The Architect" is about my obsession with Twitter. Within only a few months, Twitter went from undergound to mainstream in lighting speed. The simple concept of "What Are You Doing" has went from talking about your breakfast to promoting music, to breaking news from around the world. Every type of industry is getting their tweet on including Architecture. Artctiy from Twitter hip me to a new use for twitter when it comes to Architecture. It is called Pevstweet: Great Building in 140 Characters or Less.

Pevstweet is a humble attempt to create a Pevsner inspired twitterbase of great buildings and get architecture into the twittersphere. Niklaus Pevsner was an architectural historian whose attempt to record the buildings of England was published in the Buildings of England Series.

To see what buildings that I have been added, just follow Pevstweet on Twitter. If you want to contribute a building, just follow these instructions.

To add a building to pevstweet there is only 1 simple rule

add the tag #pevstweet to the building details on your tweet

There are, however, other things you can do to help maximise the success of your entry:

Minimum Building Details

At the pevstweet twitter site the buildings are recorded in a certain order as follows

Building Name (eg CN Tower)

Location (eg Toronto)

Date (eg 1976)

Style/Type (Modern Tower)

Significant snippet (eg tall structure with viewing platform)

Architect (anon if none)

Link (shrink your link)

#pevstweet (always add this)

Here is an example:

The people behind Pevstweet highlighted some benefits to doing this via twitter and here are some:

Research by keyword (for example here’s a twitter search for Art Nouveau buildings) - check out the list of sample searches at the bottom of this page. The beauty of twitter is that the search is live. As more and more buildings are entered they will show up on the search. You can cross reference keywords too e.g. Art Nouveau in Glasgow.

Record your favourite building or community for posterity with links to images and other information

Publicize your campaign to save a building by encouraging re-tweets

Generate the profile of a new building by encouraging re-tweets

Use other apps to analyse and present the building data in a relational way (see an example of this onTweet Grid)

Review the popularity of buildings, styles, periods or types on the twittersphere - by re-tweets or by the number of times a building has been entered.

Are you an architect with a new building to promote? Add it to pevstweet to reach an audience with an architecture based profile - and tweet it around

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